Weekend upgrade put Westpac offline

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A planned upgrade of Westpac's online banking service at the
weekend went wrong, resulting in an outage that locked out
customers, the bank says.

One customer, Tim Chmielewski, who works as webmaster for a
Melbourne software firm, said he had tried to log in on Sunday
(November 7) at 1pm. Hardly had he encountered log-in problems,
when he was contacted by his father who had encountered similar
problems.

Chmielewski said there was no one who could be called for
support as the bank's online support functions from 8am to 5pm on
weekdays.

"They tout their online banking service as being 24/7, but if
they don't have the support to go with it, what is the use of
having it?" he wrote in a posting to the Risks Digest, a forum on
risks to the public in computers and related systems.

When Chmielewski rang Westpac on Monday morning, he said there
was a recorded message regarding the problem with the service. "I
suspect they had to put it up or else their support line would be
flooded," he wrote in his posting.

Westpac spokesperson Julia Quinn said: "Last weekend Westpac
planned to implement a new and improved version of Internet Banking
for both business and consumer customers. You may have noticed
bulletins regarding this on (the) Internet Banking sign on page
over the last few weeks.

"Implementation of the new service was carried out during the
weekend, however it was reversed almost immediately as we
experienced some technical issues which meant the service didn't
perform as well as it should.

"Internet Banking was unavailable for a short time on Sunday
while this was carried out and it was back to normal service levels
in time for the busy Monday morning period. We apologise to our
customers who may have been affected by the change."